Demo Driver 8: Unmechanical (#416)
Tim Burton has so damn much to answer for.
I’m just going to lead off here with what I think is a pretty simple thesis: if your game can’t sustain a demo that lasts for at least half an hour, you might not want to put out a demo in the first place.
I blew through Unmechanical‘s entire demo in about 15 minutes, and that was with a bug that made one puzzle take longer than it should have. That’s really short. Flash-game short. And I make that comparison for a good reason, too, because Unmechanical has definitely been sipping from the cup of Flash gaming, namely the vague and surreal cup that places an emphasis on a clever look and environments over actual narrative.
That’s not necessarily to disparage games that are all about clever looks and environment; some of them are, in fact, quite fun to play. But it’s a tricky line to walk. For every game you can think of that was a fun play while mostly being based upon looking neat, I can think of a dozen that missed the point of those great games in favor of the surface elements. Unmechanical feels more like the latter than the former.
Frozen and the art of unlearning
If you don’t like it, I’m not going to convince you otherwise, but I question your decisions.
I was born as a child of winter, in the midst of a blizzard. I feel it down to my bones, feel rime creep in around the corner of my eyes when I close them, feel my skin exult at the biting air that blows in when October starts to die and make way for November. When snow falls, I smile. The cold really never did bother me anyway.
That is not why I feel a connection to Frozen. But it certainly makes the film’s chill landscape feel that much more welcoming. A kingdom of ice and frost looks less like a lonely wasteland and more like a comfortable place to be, if not forever then at least for a time.
But the connection goes deeper than that, and it ties into the fact that both of the main characters in the film have such a profoundly personal journey that you kind of half to check yourself on occasion to remind you that is, at its heart, a film for children. The themes of the movie are a lot deeper than you’d expect, and for me – for a lot of people – this is a story detailing the same journey that adult life has already put us through, but with a great deal more compassion and acceptance than you’d think possible.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy III, part 4
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
Let me tell you something, ladies and gentlemen: I’m in some real trouble here. I kind of expected that by this point in the project I’d be halfway-ish through the game, like I was with Final Fantasy II, but darn if there isn’t a lot of good stuff going on here and if we’re not even at the second of four crystals. This is not going to be a shorter jaunt, it seems. I’d be much more upset about this if Final Fantasy III weren’t a joy to play.
Albeit one with some reservations. I mean, we’re up to the Tower of Owen now, and this dungeon pulls in a lot of stuff that really could have remained by the wayside. Sure, it was cute when you had me turn my entire party into miniature versions of ourselves for about a year, but now you’re asking me to turn the group into a bunch of toads. Toads! Go home, designers, you’re drunk. At least it’s not something you need to keep up for the whole dungeon.
Telling Stories: That’s what I want
The most tragic cases of roleplaying boredom that I’ve seen are the ones that could be averted simply by letting your characters do something.
“But I do let my characters do things!” you protest, despite the fact that I’m not necessarily talking right to you at the moment. “I go to every roleplaying event! I hang out in agreed-upon hubs! I have a whole lot of backstory! I’m just bored with just sitting around and chatting!”
Exactly. Because you’re not doing anything. Because you’ve somehow mistaken presence for participation and forgotten that the key to roleplaying isn’t showing up to someone else’s event but in having your own things that need to happen. You lost sight of your characters having agency in their world and being the architects of their own fortune and (frequent) misfortune, and as a result all you’re left with is derping around in a bar waiting for someone else to act.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 